The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [56]
At another level, even the physical existence of a work of art itself discounted by Kant, in the sense that when we appreciate the beautiful, respond only to what he calls the presentation of the object—how looks or sounds to us in the imagination, how it comes to us in, again, theater of the mind. A perfect hologram of a sculpture could therefore for Kant be as beautiful as the actual sculpture visually reproduced the hologram. A Mozart symphony is beautiful heard performed an orchestra, but it is no less beautiful heard on the radio or from high-quality recording made years ago. Paintings are physical objects that hang in museums, but as objects of beauty, as aesthetic objects, only come into existence in the realm of what Kant calls the “free play imagination.” Properly experienced, a work of art is bracketed detached, disengaged—not from close attention but from immediate personal needs, desires, and practical plans.
The experience of beauty might best be characterized for Kant by the dictum “Existence is suspended.” This phrase, however, is not a translation from Kant but comes from an explanation of the requirement disinterestedness in artistic experience presented by the evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. Where Kant claimed that suspension of interest in the existence of an object was fundamental proper imaginative response to art, Tooby and Cosmides argue more broadly that our imaginative lives are fundamental to our humanity, into our nature by evolution. In particular, narrative art is them an intensified, functionally adaptive extension of mental qualities that largely set us apart from other animals.
That mental involvement in the imagined worlds of fiction is a cross-cultural universal already suggests that fiction-making is an evolved adaptation. This idea is further supported by the fact that people everywhere find stories intellectually and emotionally arresting, and that they take im mense plea sure in hearing them, reading them, or seeing them acted out. The few hunter-gatherers left today will recount narratives— fictional, mythological, historical, or daily-experience reports—around campfires, and there is no reason to doubt that such stories were told caves through the Paleolithic. The brute fact of the plea sure and universality of storytelling, Tooby and Cosmides observe, is a solid first step potential chain of explanation: “Evolutionary researchers want know why the mind is designed to find stories interesting.”
II
The ability to imagine scenarios and states of affairs not present to direct consciousness must have had adaptive power in human prehistory, does in today’s world. We imagine where we were last month, or what we plan to do tomorrow or next year. We imagine what it might be to visit that restaurant, or what it would have been like had I taken job or married that person. We try to imagine where we left that prescription or what the rough distance between Boston and New York must be. Imagination allows the weighing of indirect evidence, making chains of inference for what might have been or what might come to be. It allows for intellectual simulation and forecasting, the working out of solutions to problems without high-cost experimentation in actual practice. Pentagon strategists engage in elaborate war games, in which imagined plans of action are proposed and outcomes induced.